I strongly disliked the ad. I also get through my days just fine. I don’t understand the insinuation that people who disliked it must be somehow unable to navigate daily life.
Here’s why I disliked it: I’m one of those people who finds themselves concerned and sometimes sad at the erosion of the humanity in art. Social media and AI are changing the nature of artistic expression in a way that often feels destructive. I’ve started to intentionally unplug and use devices less in order to stay connected to what I see as the good stuff in life.
To me, this ad is the culmination of what I dislike about tech.
If they had played the ad in reverse, I think I’d have really liked it. iPad as a tool for expression. Instead, it’s presented as a tool that supersedes expression. I suspect Apple was trying to communicate the former.
Edit to respond to the edit: highly sensitive people who have visceral reactions to stuff like this are canaries in the coal mine. We need them just as much as we need substantive discussion here. Some of the backlash also originated in Japan, where culturally this was quite offensive.
> I strongly disliked the ad. I also get through my days just fine.
Same here. And besides disliking the ad myself, I imagined that many other people would dislike it too. I also wondered how on earth it could have gotten the go sign within Apple. From the outside, at least, Apple looks like the epitome of a cautious, deliberate company. I would have thought there would have been plenty of stages in the approval process where it would have been shot down.
I'm quite cynical about this one. I think that they knew that this ad would produce a reaction and would generate a ton of free press. How many people only saw this ad or knew there was a new ipad generation because of this coverage? I was one of those people.
This feels like bait for online arguments. An aggravating theme that is obvious to many but also just enough deniability to have people complain about the people who react negatively to the ad. Boom. Free press.
If you watch this ad back to back with the classic "1984" Mac ad, I found it hard not to feel that Apple has become the "Big Brother" it once despised.
This! Music programs throughout the US, are getting cut. AI has fundamentally (and not in a good way) changed the artistic landscape in ways that we cannot recover from. My soon to be high school graduate daughter, was so looking forward to pursuing her artistic passions in college, and now is taking a gap year to really understand if that is something she still thinks she can make a living at.
Not to be glib, but the "starving artist" has been a thing for a lot longer than AI (or even Apple) has been around. While I hope your daughter can indeed find a way to make a living from her passions if that's what she wants, taking time to give a good hard think about that (and for that matter whether or not trying to make your passion your job might ruin the passion) isn't the worst thing she could do.
I think there's also something to be said for the fact that while I agree school music programs should not be facing the cuts they do – and that's a battle I was fighting when I was in school too – digital music technology (and its analogs in video and photography arts) have probably been a net positive in terms of bringing the capability to create art to more people than just school programs on their own. When you can make art without consuming resources, without needing large studio spaces or especially in the case of music an entire band of other people, that can give freedom of expression to people that would otherwise have been prevented from participating in the arts because of their circumstances.
I'd also point out that while AI (like any disruptive tech in the arts) may have introduced bad changes, there are also cases where it's allowed for artistic expression that would have been impossible before. My favorite recent example is Billy Joel's new "Turn the Lights Back On" song and video. Watch the video and the obvious thing that jumps out at you is the de-aging / replacement effects. But if you close your eyes and really listen to the music too, you'll discover not only did they play with de-aging visually, but they also played with de-aging his voice. And though the whole song as he ages up in the song, his voice is also changing to match each era until it returns to the present day. That's a cool, artistic and emotional use of AI technology that just wouldn't have been possible before the tools we have now.
I'm with you in that music and art programs should be invested in and not cut. They were already being cut when I was a teenager in the 90s and it really held back my own music practice.
But in terms of your daughter pursuing an art career, was she hoping to work in commercial art? Like at an animation studio or graphic design house? Because I don't see AI taking jobs from artists doing work that ends up in galleries and museums. All of my friends that are professional visual artists here in NYC work with physical materials that go onto physical walls in galleries, and I don't think any of the AIs are going to take away from making 30-foot textile sculptures or oil paintings or immersive performance art transformations of galleries. They might even enhance the toolkit some of my friend's get to use.
And depending on what she considers making a living, she probably won't for a very long time as an artist regardless of AI. There's a huge gap between the artists making $100k on a painting and the long tail of those just holding on making enough to survive. But the one thing all of them have in common is that they really couldn't do anything else in their life, they're fully committed to it, it just would be impossible for them to not be artists. Maybe I'd suggest her going through the Artists Way [1] during her gap year while she tries to figure out if it's what she wants to do! The framing of it can get pretty, I don't know, annoying, weird, but the exercises over the 12-weeks I found to be helpful.
Recording and mass production made “I want to be a musician” similar to “I want to be a pro football player” by the middle of last century (“big band” style being popular, and live radio, kept the career alive for a while)
It cut the value, monetary and social, of anything but great talent and skill down to almost zero, where one middling ability had had substantial value. It shifted the reward for it almost entirely to the tip-top of the skill hierarchy.
I think the level most people engage with music making (a hobby, for themselves primarily) will survive just fine. Some of the already-tiny set of paying jobs it composition, especially, may be in trouble, but that was already a rare career.
Here’s why I disliked it: I’m one of those people who finds themselves concerned and sometimes sad at the erosion of the humanity in art. Social media and AI are changing the nature of artistic expression in a way that often feels destructive. I’ve started to intentionally unplug and use devices less in order to stay connected to what I see as the good stuff in life.
To me, this ad is the culmination of what I dislike about tech.
If they had played the ad in reverse, I think I’d have really liked it. iPad as a tool for expression. Instead, it’s presented as a tool that supersedes expression. I suspect Apple was trying to communicate the former.
Edit to respond to the edit: highly sensitive people who have visceral reactions to stuff like this are canaries in the coal mine. We need them just as much as we need substantive discussion here. Some of the backlash also originated in Japan, where culturally this was quite offensive.